12 College Experiences Every Resume Needs

12 College Experiences Every Resume Needs Once you leave college, youll be looking for a job. You need to prepare for working life whilst at college. 66% of hiring managers believe college graduates are not prepared for the workplace after leaving college, so how can you change that? Which experience should you carry out to make sure you can add them to your resume when the time comes? This infographic from Boundless can help you! Takeaways: Why not join a club in your freshman year? Youll meet people and it could be related to your major! Have you tried studying in a new place, where youll obviously have to learn a new language? A great skill to have! Hiring managers dig someone who has had experience of leadership try and work your way up that club. Build a digital portfolio that you can show to future recruiters and hiring managers. Bring in guest speakers to your club and get your name out there! RELATED: 6 Simple Ways to Make Your Resume Noticeable

Why Content is Key to a Compelling Employer Brand

Why Content is Key to a Compelling Employer Brand There are great people out there deciding whether or not theyll apply for a role with your  organisation. Will  they throw their CV against the ad blindly?  Unlikely. Will they Google your  company first, read up on whatever they can find and then make a call? There you go. Much more likely. When was the last time you checked what content is out there for your potential employees to read? Furthermore, when was the last time you adjusted your content strategy to make sure you have control over what theyre learning about your company? Keep reading for a compelling case study outlining why content is essential for employer branding, as told by  Todd Wheatland, head of strategy at King Content,  an end-to-end digital specialist content marketing agency. Have a listen, keep reading and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast. How do organisations use content marketing for employer branding? They dont.  Im a marketer, I came at this space, this gig very much from a lets help marketers become publishers, lets help people understand that the worlds changed and they dont have to keep going out and doing global funnel marketing or promotion. All that beautiful, wonderful stuff that content marketing represents in terms of philosophy. I think organisations are absolutely getting the budgets that they didnt have two years ago and I see year on year, I see doubling, tripling, quadrupling of budgets and employer branding from many organisations. Getting much more sophisticated in the analytics and the way that they apply that and especially for global organisations much more localised in recognising the connection between geography and specific role demand. Does that mean a lot more content is being created and published in the space? It does. But I think the shift at the same time, as we all know, weve seen the great promise of social media, six or seven years ago, it was going to be free forever and you could just shout your messages and people would click on your links and come pouring back to your website, because thats what they wanted to do. Or so we deluded ourselves into thinking. The reality of those platforms is that that actually was so effective that everyone did it and we quickly killed that as a potential model. And Facebook, weve got client organisations under 1% for organic reach on Facebook now, weve seen even in the last three months, dramatic plunging in returns on organic visibility for many publishers. Is the solution  to create great  content that will resonate with your audience? The solution is definitely not more content. The solution is developing content with intent and understanding before you create it, how youre going to get it in front of the right audience. Its much less about, Gee Ive got a blog and Ive got four social channels so I need to produce a piece of content every day for the blog and shout it out in the social channels. Its much less about that, one piece of content every day and much more about how to make sure every piece of content that goes out is actually trying to achieve an objective that Im intentionally developing it for and is actually getting a connection with the audience that Im putting it in front of. How do you go about measuring the ROI on content? Youve got a legacy technology sitting around, youve got a lot of start-ups trying to do very different things as well. So its definitely an interesting space and there are things happening, but you see products like Clinch for example that are trying to do really clever things with combining more employer burning-type content assets with the actual vacancy, so youre creating this bridge between the branding activity, story-telling activity, and the actual Okay, how are we going to make money out of this thing? And the analytics that those sorts of platforms are able to achieve now are really quite breath-taking even compared to where it was even six months ago. So I think were going to see continued evolution of how relatively easy it is to track and score and get indicators as to Are these things working? And I think in general buckets, youre always trying to understand, Well, who has seen this content in what context? How has it seemed to influence what they were doing or thinking or their willingness to share or generate some organic or some other indicated interest in what youve created? And ultimately the hardest thing, which everyone struggles with, in any audience objective, people struggle with how can we demonstrate in ROI that it links to a business outcome for us. And that in most cases, is sales or lead generation or job application or join a community. So its being really clear on what is the metric we can measure that can demonstrate as close to possible that there is a money component thats actually being delivered here. Its really hard. Whats the content strategy for your personal brand? I think from a personal perspective, Ive always been fascinated by the role of individuals and individuals within organisations and theres a line between your personal and professional brand or where do you cross the line between whats good for you and whats good for the business? A very common challenge for a lot of people who are in this space, especially really active in social and in a big organisation. Huge number of people whove been shopped from those organisations because they seem to have crossed some imaginary line at some point, but for me People love to make fun of LinkedIn, I love LinkedIn, I think its definitely my most useful platform. Ive actually become very, a little bit obsessed with Snapchat of late and needing to explain to my son why he wasnt going to get access to it and him saying it wasnt fair for me to tell him that if I didnt know enough of what the platform was. And so I forced myself to get into it and I find it for me, it feels like the early days of Twitter. Its kind of funny, people dont really know how to do it, theyre really confused, its unusual, theres lots of humour and discovery and newness about it. I think its definitely going to become a B2B play. Ive actually engaged with a lot of my clients on Snapchat now and Ive found it kind of like, you can get client relationships going on Facebook, for example, then theres just a tone difference and a level of emotional connection that you have for that person for some strange reason that you feel on Facebook that you wouldnt perhaps on LinkedIn. You can achieve the same thing on Twitter, though its getting harder, its becoming less of that sort of platform, but I think Snapchats where that sort of activity is really happening now. That sort of personal connection, the ability to do direct messaging in a funny way with the clients. I actually did it with the head of a fairly large organisation recently where we literally just had what would have been an email conversation previously, literally just taking stupid photos of ourselves with filters and then writing text on the actual snaps, and sending each other. So I think thats a real interesting blend, or breaking down of traditional comms channels and the way you can do that. What are you and your clients looking to improve and expand on at the moment? Theres an underlying complexity now to content marketing now that didnt exist a couple of years ago. It used to be very much like okay, like I said before, you cant just whack some stuff on your website, copy a link and shout about it in social channels and people will come and theyll love it. And theyll join a community or theyll download something or theyll give you an email address. It was very, very simple. You had to really be bad at it, six or seven years ago, to not to get some kind of success even if you knew what you were trying to do. And I still think its possible to start from scratch and be very, very successful but its definitely not about producing more content. Its definitely not about just going, oh well shit, I like to write and I know some people and Im going to write some stuff and Im going to put it out there. Our experience is consumerism and its typically now through discovery, and that discovery may be contextual ads served up to us, it may be inline feed ads on Facebook, for example, so thats where youre competing against peoples mums and their brothers and their friends and the disaster in Turkey and whatever, youve got these other things that are getting pushed in, in a contextual way, and theyre speaking to that person, in an understanding way, theyre recognising who that person is as an individual. So its almost as if the stakes have been raised at every single level. Now when the stakes get raised, its Oh shit, weve got to do more and more and more. Thats absolutely when you have to do the opposite and just do a lot less. And I would advise anyone to do all they can to declass our things. Not do five things, just do one thing. Start from a very simple premise and reduce the frequency and just focus on quality, consistency, and things you have a heightened degree of confidence are going to engage with a person. And test everything. A/B testing is iterative responses, even if you spend the time developing a strategy, you recognised that thats just a hypothesis, thats not the way the world is going to work until you actually put it into action. And even if you have a strategy and its worked, its not going to work the same way in six months time. Because these platforms that were playing in are constantly changing. I dont know how many updates that the Twitters and Facebooks and LinkedIns have made this year but its at least one a week from all of them that can have a significant impact on the financial viability of a certain tactic or not. Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddWheatland  and dont forget to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.

The State of Tech Recruiting in 2017

The State of Tech Recruiting in 2017 The tech world is progressing rapidly, with new devices, software programs, and technological advancements emerging all the time. As with any fast-paced industry, the flourishing job market of tech is in a state of constant change and development. Consequently, IT hiring managers are closely monitoring the employment landscape, keeping an eye on fluctuating factors that will affect the decisions of hiring companies and potential employees. Given the fluidity of the tech job market, it can be difficult to keep track of everything at once. Modis  has provided us with a comprehensive infographic on this topic. Modis surveyed 500 IT decision makers responsible for hiring within their companies, then collated this data to reveal some interesting findings. The key focus areas for this survey included rehiring policies, high-tech hotspots, salaries, future technologies, and diversity challenges. Notable findings: Finding good interpersonal skills is the toughest recruitment challenge, with a third (31%) saying that soft skills, such as teamwork and great communication, were the hardest to find among candidates. Most tech workers are more concerned with the total compensation than they will receive rather than company stability. 41% said the biggest challenge, in terms of diversity, was age, followed by 28% for gender, and just 21% for ethnicity. This may be partially down to the fact that people are now working until a later age in life. The most prized benefit for employees is flexible working hours, followed by the ability to work remotely. A flat corporate structure is the least important benefit. Over half (60%) of men currently working in the tech industry agreed that benefits such as free fruit and flexible working are more appealing than salary. 42% expect a higher salary than the 2017 market average. When tech talent leaves, companies aren’t too keen to take them back, with a third (33%) of companies refusing to take back employees that have previously left, no matter how long ago it was. Employers will pay a higher salary for top talent, with a third (33%) that said they were prepared to offer a 6-9% increase and just under a third (32%) willing to offer 10-15% more. Over half (58%) said that candidates with a tenure of five or more years at their previous role were the most attractive applicants. Interestingly, hiring managers who have worked in IT for 10 or more years viewed a tenure of less than one year in a role, most negatively. Whereas, young people are more comfortable with a short tenure â€" as respondents age 25 and under were less likely to see this an issue, than the hiring managers who were age 55-64. In terms of online vs. brick and mortar education, 27% were more concerned with the quality of the institution rather than its type and one fifth (20%) view both types of degrees equally. Modis also predicted the cities that were due for a tech boom, which included Chicago, Houston, and Omaha. The thriving tech sector has made the job market for top talent more competitive than ever before, and with so many mitigating factors that come into play, it will be interesting to monitor what challenges will arise for both potential employees and hiring managers in the coming year. Perhaps one of the most unsettling findings is that artificial intelligence will likely have the biggest tech impact in coming years, potentially meaning the loss of jobs with the replacement of computers that can complete tasks in half the time at a fraction of the price. About the author: Araminta Hannah  writes marketing, business and career advice and work with a wide range of people across the globe.

6 Steps to Finding Your Passions

6 Steps to Finding Your Passions Passion is such a BIG word. So much pressure, so many expectations… Everywhere you look nowadays there seems to be this new it-girl or passion-guru or some other self-proclaimed expert on finding the magical wand and the fastest path to overcoming all the challenges and finding your true passion. They talk about passion as if it’s a magical fairy you can entreat with cookies. Here’s the thing: sometimes passions and their matching career do just fall out of the sky. But if you wait for that forever, you’ll find yourself very bored, very unemployed, and very unfulfilled. So’ I’ve gather the 6 fundamental step-by-step actions (not magical spell) to actually uncovering your passions (yes plural! There are many â€" read bellow). 1. Relax. Take a deep breath and realize you aren’t alone and this feeling isn’t abnormal. You might look around you and think everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing, and that you’re the only person in the world who feels confused and directionless. But that simply isn’t true. The majority of people find themselves at this crossroads in at some point in their lives. Nothing remains static. Our values, interests, and life circumstances are constantly shifting, and with those shifts comes the inevitable restlessness and need to forge a new path. From my own personal experience going through this confusing time, and from my work with many coaching clients who have been in this position, you WILL find your way through. Be patient and kind with yourself, and remain confident in your own good judgment and problem solving abilities. 2. Believe Most people don’t believe it’s possible to have a passionate career. In fact, society trains us that a lot of unbelievably fulfilling things can’t be done. Showing yourself you can do things you used to write off as impossible has a confidence-compounding effect on our life like no other. You can then apply that on a larger and larger scale. Yep, you will  feel self-doubt, fear, and confusion about your life passion and your decisions around it. You may not have certainty or even clarity that you are doing the “right” thing, you just have to believe that you are. 3. Let go of “one true passion” Self-proclaimed gurus love to say there is only one magical passion for each of us, but that’s not true â€" you have hundreds of passions. A passion is something you enjoy and are interested in. A passion is something you enjoy and are interested in. Passions are what you want to BE, not what you want to DO. Passions change and evolve as you do, so it’s just about impossible to be satisfied with one passion and one career for your entire life. The minute you seeking your life passion, you’re living it. Your passion isn’t just a destination â€" it’s a journey. Enjoy the process of uncovering it. View the search as your passion for right now. 4. Brainstorm You can do this with pen and paper, on your computer or even with an audio recorder. Write down every subject you’re interested in. Let go of your preconceived notions. Forget about what you think is possible, and write down everything you feel remotely excited about. Then study the list, some of it will be gibberish, but there will be golden nuggets in there. At this point, don’t even worry about if what you’re excited about is feasible or not. This phase is all about tapping into who you already are. There’s a reason you are who you are and that you have the quirks you have. We’re all naturally inclined to be great at something. And our strengths show us where we should focus. 5. Analyze You must know who you are, what you’re good at, what values you hold highest, what you enjoy doing and what you absolutely hate. This is not something you learn in a book. You extract it from your life experiences. The more experiences the better. When in doubt, keep learning and experimenting. The best way to learn about yourself is through the art of micro-experiments and rapid self-learning. 6. Make a commitment If you’re anything like me when I was starting out, you’re buzzing with hundreds of ideas and possible paths you could take. Deciding on just one seems impossible. It seems so impossible that you never take action. You remain paralyzed by the thought of picking the “perfect” one. The reason you’re paralyzed is because there is no perfect one. You have to go with your gut and just start. You can’t think your way to clarity, so if you’ve been confused for a long time, you have to take action. Finding Your Passions = Creating Your Future Make a commitment to be a  passionate Ms. Career Girl.  Theres no time like right now to start creating your future.

Resume Writing to Reflect Retired But Continuing Working

Resume Writing to Reflect Retired But Continuing WorkingResume writing to reflect retired but continued to work is not too easy. You should remember that the main thing you should be concentrating on is your skills and your abilities. While you are checking out the new opportunities available in the market, you must be keenly attentive to things that are happening in the industry. You can start performing your job as a resume writer in order to become a business consultant and help you focus on your current skills.This can be the best thing for you when you are planning to check out the things in the industry that can give you the best business opportunities. For getting better business opportunities, you must have to focus on how you can perform the function of a resume writer. You must be successful with your working profile, skills and talents. You must be able to write great resumes in order to do well with your job. You must not forget to mention the success of previous jobs and previous assignments.In order to become the most professional in this industry, you must get professional help when you are writing the resume of your previous job and the job advertisement. A great resume can be produced if you choose the right options when you are creating it. You must know what the possible next career path can give you. Resume writing to reflect retired but continued to work can be done by employing an experienced professional.This professional guidance is necessary in order to succeed in this career. They have their own expertise about the specific requirements of working in a company. This will help you prepare the perfect resume which can grab the attention of the employer.Resume writing to reflect retired but continuing to work is not at all difficult. The only thing you need to do is to avoid a lack of the correct information. The resume writing to reflect retired butcontinuing working can include the benefits you have been offering at the former job. If y ou got an award for your previous job, you can mention it. It will be more impressive if you were in charge of drafting a well-written resume, which is also being presented to the employers.You must think of giving an original and interesting resume for the interview in order to gain admission into a job. Most of the times, the professional writers who are working in the industry cannot distinguish the difference between an original and a counterfeit resume. You must provide the employers with information which are best for them. The information in your resume must reflect the best and brightest professional skills that you have.Also, you must be concentrating on the company resources, the new skills and the other assets that you are offering. In this case, your resume must be unique and attractive. You must not be writing the resume for some needy products. You must know what to include in your resume in order to get the job. You must also make sure that you meet all the requiremen ts of the employer.As soon as you start writing the resume, you will find yourself enjoying every minute of it. Your writing skills will grow and you will be able to write in any type of format. All the ideas that you have, you will use to your advantage when you are preparing the resume. You can also seek help from your friends and relatives and add a bit of their experience in writing a resume.

Does Your Brand Really Need a Social Marketing Strategy

Does Your Brand Really Need a Social Marketing Strategy Photo credit: greyweed via Foter.com / CC BY Photo credit: greyweed via Foter.com / CC BY When it comes to your digital marketing strategy, how important is social media content for mobile users? According to CMI, 87% of marketers are using social media as a delivery mechanism for content â€" making it the most common way to get content to an audience. ComScore reported that mobile engagement on social media has grown by 55% in just 12 months. Mobile users are more active and are spending increasingly more of their time on their mobile devices browsing content. In order to connect with a wider range of users in a more intimate way, your brand needs to focus on creating a social media strategy that takes into account mobile users and the other platforms available on mobile. Using Your Content for Social Media Many brands turn to social media as a way to gain followers and increase their website traffic. The benefits of inbound content designed for social media are huge in attracting users that are a good fit for your brand. Content on social media needs to be visually intriguing in order to catch the attention of users that are scrolling on their mobile devices. Most mobile users are browsing a lot of content while often distracted by other events around them, so content needs to be concise and easy to skim with headers. Include a blurb and image with your link on social media to better increase click-throughs to your content. Respecting a User’s Space Mobile optimized content is a great way to connect with users, but it is sending your content right to your user’s personal device. With social media marketing, you are able to connect with your users on their own terms and by their own choosing. Your users have to choose to follow you, forcing you to come up with better content that is worth following and sharing. If you want to get more engagement, you will be pushed to get to know your audience better and create a strong content strategy. Allow Your Users to Find You People now fully expect brands to be on social media â€" especially Facebook. Most users will look for brands on Facebook when they want to check for brand updates or look at what the brand has to offer. If you are absent from social mediaâ€"or, worse, if you don’t update your page consistentlyâ€"then you will come off as behind the times and may seem irrelevant to users. If they can’t find you on social media, then your users are likely to turn to your competitors. Don’t make the mistake of neglecting your social media presence. Use social media to better connect with your users, increase website traffic and get the most out of your content. Author Biography Ken Rhie Ken is the CEO of Trumpia, the most complete SMS software with mass SMS messaging, smart targeting and automation

Five Things You Can Teach Yourself Online Today - CareerAlley

Five Things You Can Teach Yourself Online Today - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. If you were to ask any successful business person whether they could still improve some aspect of their professional life, they would likely tell you that they could. The reality is that while there are lots of people who are great at lots of things, no one is perfect at all of them. For instance, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, still feels as if he should be actually be coding the website that made him a billionaire. His personal challenge for 2012 was to code every day. He also started a book club a few years ago and has recently been touring the United States which has prompted some to believe that he intends to run for political office one day. Whatever his future ambitions, the fact remains that despite his immense success, he is still trying to improve things about him and his company so that he can continue to be successful. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, you too should be just as concerned about the possibilities of self-improvement. A lot is often said, especiall y when you are young, about how you should embrace all sorts of different opportunities so that you can put them on your CV. This may suggest that altruism has been corrupted by capitalism until it has become a conceit designed to make a person more valuable, but it works. Here are a few things that you can teach yourself so that you seem like a more appealing candidate to prospective employers: The world of business is becoming more and more connected, and Marshall McLuhans conception of the global village is becoming a reality. Being polylingual is, therefore, a great skill to have that can set you apart. Some languages may be more valuable than others, with lots of people studying Mandarin in anticipation of Chinas economy becoming the most valuable in the world. However, teaching yourself any language demonstrates that you can concentrate, have a good memory, and have self-discipline. Besides, you can do it for free online on sites such as Duolingo. Photo Source Another great thing that you can do on the internet today is a degree. It is usually a cheaper option than the more traditional route of going to a campus every day and listening to professors in person. Whatever subject interests you, whether it is a masters in accounting and finance by distance learning or a bachelors in fine art, you can now do it from home. However, you do not have to do an actual degree in order to study at some of the finest universities in the world. OpenCulture has collated over 1200 online courses from schools such as Yale and Harvard, and all of them are free. Photo Source If music is more your thing, you can teach yourself how to play just about any instrument that youd like. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of video tutorials on sites like Youtube. Before long, you will be teaching courses yourself and making money too. Maybe you just want to make some money. Well, the internet has got you covered there too. Investopedia offers a free academy which will teach you everything you want to know about trading stocks on the market. We are always eager to hear from our readers. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions regarding CareerAlley content. Good luck in your search,Joey Google+